On the Pleasure Island

Patrizia Piccinini

Architect and journalist | She deals with design and lifestyle trends. She wrote for more than twenty years first, for Home and then for Marie Claire Maison. She has published for Rizzoli Electa the book, Carlo Scarpa, Beyond the matter and, in October, a new monograph dedicated to Piero Portaluppi, published by the same publishing house, is expected to be released in the bookstore.

Mixing objects to invent stories: design can turn into a game to transform our daily lifeMixing objects to invent stories: design can turn into a game to transform our daily life

Freeing images, colors and shapes to discover the pleasure of invention, imagination and creativity - even design can go further and sail as lightly as a child, following the route traced by Bruno Munari and Gianni Rodari.

Maybe putting together some elements that appear to be far away, on two opposite sides, and imagining unexpected or even impossible solutions, to invent new stories through the combination of figures. "Let's pretend that I was ..." - that's how children create stories, using the imperfect tense; they say "I was" instead of "I am" because, as Umberto Eco wrote, "it is a distinctive way of projecting the action in a world of possible... It is a narrative. […] After all, every narrative is about pretending. There is an element of play ".

And even adults like to play - they go nuts for the Eames' Plywood Elephant designed in 1945 or Enzo Mari's 16 animals created for Danese in 1957, which don’t make any impact on kids. So if we too "pretend" that the monkeys / lamps designed by Marcantonio Raimondi Malerba for Seletti can put on a show climbing the stairs that turn into a carpet; same for the cats (the Ombres De Chats table sculptures by Opinion Ciatti) or the hen (from the Riedizioni Archivio collection by Bitossi Ceramiche) that comfortably rests on an ottoman, while watching the butterflies flying (those signed by Ghidini 1961);

the same butterflies that, on the wings of imagination, encourage everyone to explore the LoveTheSign online catalog, to always invent new stories together.